Gerard Henderson, and the servile, unctuous dissembling commentariat do their thing for Chairman Rupert ...

(Above: Rupert Murdoch in the good old days).

Only Tuesday, and yet it's been a tough hard week for the commentariat doing the hard yards down in the coal mine, working away at the seams of black gold, as only people at one with the lumpenproletariat can understand or imagine.

There was the awkward and tricky business of stripping the crazed lone gunman of any ideological or theological affiliations, or better still, conflating left, right and Islamic terrorism (as Guy Rundle observed in Into the abyss of the Norway massacre, by pointing out the splendid efforts of Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and others, and there's Peter Hartcher this morning reminding us that there were no right-wing terrorist attacks in Europe last year, but 45 left-wing and anarchist and 160 separatist attacks, and by golly, they did a power of damage up against the feeble effort of the lone crazed gunman. And yes, the header for his piece actually reads Norwegian massacre is wrong, not far right).

Then there was the always unfinished business of the carbon tax, and peddling the Tony Abbott line on climate change (whichever way the weather vane is pointing today), a task taken up yesterday by Paul Sheehan in Labor all tied up in red and green tape, wherein Julia Gillard's robotic sing-song voice is given a pasting but Abbott's Chicken Little routines are given a tick.

Sure enough Labor's brand of big government is sliding into structural trouble, whereas Abbott's inability to hold a thought for longer than a millisecond before embarking on a completely contradictory thought is overlooked ...

It's sometimes called fair and balanced opinion-making.

And then there's the never-ending business of redeeming Chairman Rupert, and firmly establishing that potential criminal charges arising from the NOTW scandal are mere fripperies, and the real damage is being done by the chattering elites, far removed from the lumpenproletariat desire for a good tabloid read (sob, yes, for years I read the Daily Mirror after my father brought it home from the pub, but where's that banner now Mr. Murdoch?)

Frank Furedi took up the baton at Counterpoint to express outrage at outrage mongering, because as the summary so succinctly puts it The problem he says isn't so much with the News Of The World but with shallow views being loudly expressed by the quality media.

You can waste valuable moments of your life by heading off here, to Rupert, Rupert! Can we all take a cold shower please to listen, and to discover just how unctuous and servile Paul Comrie-Thomson can be as an interviewer in a commentariat love-in, and never mind bribing the police or infringing on people's privacy, you middle class geese with your squawking vindictive shallow ways ...

But wait, don't pass go just yet, you've still to collect your commentariat steak knives, because it's prattling Polonius Gerard Henderson day, and his topic is?

Yep, it's Murdoch critics bury the lead in premature obituaries, and as always it's the evil ABC radio, and in particular Henderson's bete noir, 702 morning show presenter Deborah Cameron, who aroused his ire by showing an unseemly interest in Chairman Rupe and his wife.

The defensive ploy led with by Henderson is straight out of the Murdoch playbook:

Well, the entire story was certainly newsy. But was it really bigger than the fact that some 10 million Somalis are facing death by famine, or that the disastrous Greek economy could undermine the euro currency, or that the United States might default on its debt obligations? Not in the view of many non-journalists, I suspect.

Certainly not for the Murdoch Times cartoonist, who led with this cartoon, and which was quickly circulated around the ether in its rough screen cap form:

Wow, did that cop a blast, from Mfonobong Nsehe (On Offensive Cartoons, Rupert Murdoch, And Starving Somali Children) and dozens of others in the chattering classes (Cartoon in Murdoch's Paper Calls Hacking Inquiry a Distraction From African Famine).

Still it's good to see that Henderson is all class, like a Times' cartoonist.

Of course the defence relies on the notion that the average non-journalist punter can't hold two or three thoughts in the head at the one time (Murdoch empire criminality, US debt crisis, Greek economy, lone crazed gunman without any ideological or religious baggage, Somali crisis), or if multi-tasking must be attempted, then surely the ideal topic to drop is Murdoch empire criminality, because that only involves journalists talking about journalists (as opposed to say, journalists bribing cops, or interfering with messages on a dead girl's phone).

Well the rest of Henderson's column is full of it, which is to say full of irritation at Geoffrey Robertson QC, and full of attempts to downplay the issues involved, and giving - without any evidence - the rest of the empire, and other tabloids outside the empire, a clean bill of health.

It's such a timeless piece of forelock tugging and servile supine Rupert Murdoch grovelling that it makes Comrie-Thomson sound like Ed Murrow on steroids.

Of particular appeal is the notion that newspapers are quite harmless, and that the Murdoch press always follows rather than sets public opinion.

This is roughly equivalent to the notion that a consistent diet of television commercials will have no impact on consumption habits. Who'll be the first to tell that to the advertisers and the advertising industry?

But it's all part of Henderson giving the empire a clean bill of health.

First he praises the works of Caesar - though if I was Caesar I'd tend to get worried about the ides of March:

The legitimate criticism of the operations of News of the World should not detract from the positive contribution made by Murdoch and News Corporation to journalism in Australia, Britain, the US and within Asia.

He is one of the few surviving proprietors who believes in newspapers.

Which is handy I suppose since none of the commentariat, or the Liberal opposition seem to believe in the NBN, or the power of the intertubes.

But then, as always happens at some point with Henderson, he overplays his hand, and in his bid to be ideologically correct, and cover all the bases, ends up sounding simply silly:

Certainly Fox News in the US runs a political agenda. Yet Fox is primarily successful because it is entertaining. The same can be said of BSkyB in Britain, which does not advocate causes. In any event, diverse views can be found within Fox. The Fox News Watch program contains both right-of-centre and left-of-centre commentators.

A diversity of views in Fox?

Even Fox in its rare sane moments doesn't pretend it's fair and balanced. Who can forget that fine moment when Jon Stewart dissected Chris Wallace's Fox News Logic:

"I think we're the counterweight," said the Fox anchor, "I think that they have a liberal agenda and we tell the other side of the story." After flashing Fox's "Fair & Balanced" logo at his audience, Stewart traced Wallace's logic: "News only comes in two sides. And if the conservative side isn't being told, what's being told must be liberal." (here)

A little window dressing might get Fox out of jail with Henderson, but it sure as hell doesn't mean that it presents a diversity of views.

Once he's given the Murdoch empire the all-clear, Henderson then reverts to the bashing of his favourite piñata:

In Australia, however, the ABC's Media Watch program has had a succession of left-of-centre presenters for more than a quarter of a century and continues to broadcast only the perspective of a single presenter.

Strangely the Gerard Henderson column has been presented for years from the perspective of a single presenter.

And what did the single presenter at Media Watch say last night about Chairman Rupert?

As media analyst and former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, put it last week:
...there's every chance that when Murdoch goes, his newspapers, or at least many of them, will go with him. — ABC, The Drum Online, 22nd July, 2011
Read the full article
And if they're put up for sale, who'll buy them? That's actually quite a scary thought. News Ltd's enemies should be careful what they wish for. (The politics of privacy)

Oh noes, someone else in charge of Chairman Rupert's papers?

Scary thought Mr. Holmes. Why we might get Genghis Khan. Oh wait a second, we already have someone who makes Genghis Khan sound like a liberal, inner urban, chattering, middle class elitist.

And so back to Henderson for a final flourish of floozies:

Sure, Murdoch is unfashionable in certain quarters and some resent him because he successfully confronted the print unions in the '80s. However, his contribution to journalism has been a positive one. On the present evidence, the reaction to the News of the World scandal is over the top.

Actually, truth to tell, because of his ideological perspective, anything that Henderson scribbles is as wayward and distorting as ... an ABC presenter ... and surely his contribution to journalism is on the evidence a negative one, and on the present evidence his attempt to downplay the reaction to the NOTW scandal turns him into a disingenuous, dissembling fellow traveller of the most mortifying kind (unless conservatives now believe that consorting with and apologising for law-breakers is the new world order).

Still, for the first time in weeks, Henderson didn't mention the chattering wayward middle classes or the urban inner elites.

For that defence, you'll need to listen to the blather of Frank Furedi, rabbiting on about the evils of tabloids (The Sun) while defending tabloids, and blaming it all on the hapless condescending ways of toffy nosed broadsheet types.

If you go there, may the absent lord have mercy on your long suffering soul - and if that's missing, your long suffering ears ...

(Below: time for a little Jon Stewart relief, after a dose of desiccated Henderson coconut).

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